It’s Standing Room Only for Broadband Stimulus Meeting

Unhappy lobbyists were lined up on a sidewalk outside the Commerce Department this morning after seats for a public meeting on broadband Internet buildouts quickly filled.

Not only did the 500-seat auditorium quickly reach capacity but so did several overflow rooms as three agencies that will oversee disbursing almost $8 billion from the economic stimulus bill for the broadband Internet effort came together to provide some guidance to potential grant recipients.

For the Commerce Department, Agriculture Department and Federal Communications Commission, this was the first of several joint public hearings this month to provide more information on the grant process and allow the agencies to get feedback on how they should structure the program.

“I don’t think we’ve had this many people in the Commerce Department since it was built,” joked Bernadette McGuire-Rivera, a department official whose office oversees broadband grants.

Meetings will be held in Washington from March 16-24 as well as a meeting on March 17 in Las Vegas and one the following day in Flagstaff, Ariz.

Commerce Department officials say they want to begin accepting applications next month. They plan to have three rounds of grant awards, two in 2009 and a final round in the summer of 2010. The Agriculture Department, meanwhile says it will also probably have three rounds of grant applications and will open up the first round in the next 60 to 90 days.

Before the money can go out, however, federal officials need to make several key decisions on things like how they’ll define “unserved” and “underserved,” which wasn’t really answered in the stimulus legislation. Lobbying around that issue is expected to be heavy, as phone and cable companies try to ensure competitors don’t get too much of a leg up from the government funding.

For example, cable lobbyists have already been pushing lawmakers and regulators to funnel most of the money to unserved areas, suggesting in a letter to Congress last week that “we would propose that any area with at least one provider of current generation higher speed access, i.e. 3 megabits per second downstream and 768 kilobits upstream or higher, should be regarded as ‘served.’”

The FCC will help advise the agencies on definitons and other related issues, one agency official said. The agency opened up a formal notice Tuesday morning to get comment on how it should write a national broadband strategy plan, which its due to present next year. The FCC said it will focus on these issues at its meeting in April.

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